We can't stop thinking about individual's privacy while we are finding the way to get out of the hurdle laid by conservative IT infrastructure. It's always in doubt that whether data security and privacy for application hosting can be maintained successfully at outside company.
In U.S., Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) announced the requirements to protect individual's protected health information. No matter if such important information is going to be embedded in the message or transferred over the public Internet, it should be encrypted with technologies like 256 bit AES algorithms. In the programming point of view, it's an idea in mind when we are dealing with such kind of information. Then, how about the server where our applications are sitting? Are they secured enough to provide web services to the public while both data security and individual's privacy can be maintained?
Application developers need to consider a stable platform for baby-sitting their applications. To minimize the cost of setting up expensive and ever-changing hardware of the application server, Amazon gave out a solution - Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). It is not difficult to image that nowaday developers build their own application image and plug it into the computing cloud whenever they want. Flexible charging model makes this happen. You can choose hourly based model or data transfer based model. People can release concern about the hardware restriction on their applications, in terms of time and money. Once a vitual machine image is built up and the programming souce codes are deployed ready, it is just one click action to start your application on the Internet. It really shortens the time to customize the system environment. People want to sell their application but they may not want to spend time to build up I.T. infrastructure on their own.
System virtualization can be done in-house, but you'll need to make sure your system environment safe and sound. Now we need one step forward to facilitate our services in a real 24/7 situation. I could image it brings lots of opportunities to the application developers, based on this new charging model from Amazon.
